IT-Director.com: RapidMiner – a potential game changer

We are faced with ever growing volumes of data and, within that data, we know that there exists the answers to many of the most critical questions we face; who will buy, who will leave us, when will they change their behaviour, what are the signs that show we need to intervene to save an account, what are the signs that this is a loyal profitable customer and so forth. However to date to actually extract that knowledge in an actionable form has required time, expertise, the crossing over from technical to business skilled personal, and above all lots of cost.

A decade ago people started to realise that having only a handful of models which took months to build, many weeks to tune, and many weeks to explain to the business was not a viable model, and a revolution was started in the data mining industry. The goal was to speed up the process, reduce the reliance on very expensive statistically-savvy professionals and, at the same time, to not reduce the predictive power of the tools to find the interesting gems within the mass of data at our disposal.